La Biennale de Québec: What Shifts When Ice Splits

Ice is a charged word globally. For many Americans, it is the acronym for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, that harbinger of xenophobia, along with a cold indicator of weather changes, especially as an agent of climate change. The Arctic region loses ice, and other countries find themselves having more of it than they’ve had in decades. In Québec City, at the transition from winter to spring, it is an abundant near-neutral endearing factor—the slippery ice that coats streets, icicles are a full-toothed smile off of New France-style and Châteauesque buildings and large frozen masses are pushed downstream by the St. Lawrence River. “Briser la glace/Splitting Ice,” the theme of Manif d’Art’s Biennale de Québec (the only winter biennial in North America, held in Québec City, Lévis, Baie-Saint-Paul and Joliette), has many associations: from the performance Danse dans la neige (1948) by Françoise Sullivan (who is currently 102 and a matriarch in Québec art) in the ’40s to moments of tension, the breaking from old into new and multiplicity.

Curator of the biennial Didier Morelli’s vision positions the cold season as an active collaborator in reshaping space and perception, asking the question: what happens when art uses ice and water to dissolve borders that feel permanent? He brings his perspective as an art historian and performance historian to the fore. When asked what his starting point for the biennial was, he tells Observer, “It’s branded and put forward as this winter biennial in North America. One of the things that I really thought about was, what do we do in the northern regions of North America at the end of February? We go out with our bodies and we meet wintry landscapes. We transform them by performing on them these different gestures and actions. That’s something that’s been done for centuries on these lands. And so, there was this idea of really embracing the identity of the biennial and embracing the season, and the kind of climate in which it’s located in the city itself.” In a world as solid as ice on the exterior but as fluid as water, he adds, “I wanted things to be both poetic and political. All of the work, or at least most of it, in my mind, has a type of politics inscribed in it, even though it might not be big ‘P’ politics. It might be little ‘p’ politics. That’s because I believe that all art is political and all art is social because it’s inscribed in the world we live in, and it’s important to acknowledge that.”

Splitting Ice connects Québec’s geopolitics to the world as explored in work by 60 international artists in 41 locations. At the multi-floor building Espace Quatre Cents, one of the biennial sites, the first artwork I encountered in the lobby was the gigantic An Iceberg that Breathes (2024) by Jessie Kleeman (an Inuit Greenlandic artist based in Denmark)—a literal expression of the theme. Morelli reported the “drastic shift” of meaning of Kleeman’s work, despite it being included in the show from the beginning of its conception. He invited Kleeman two years ago, before Greenland became so much a part of hot-button international conversations about American and Danish imperialism. The work gestures to Kleeman’s home, which is the site of a climate catastrophe. “What’s happened over the last couple of months with the U.S.A., that piece takes on a whole new tenor. Having it exhibited or thinking about exhibiting it and realizing that Greenland has a historical colonial past with indigenous communities with Denmark, but now there’s a whole new empire, a whole new imperial power that’s trying to impose its strength and its might on the communities there.”

Paired with the politically charged works are moments of reprieve, such as Mexico City-based Tania Candiani’s Listening to Ice and Moving Water. This work, appropriating military technology from World War II, is right outside of Espace Quatre Cents as a tube that goes down to the inlet of the St. Lawrence River. Joyfully, participants were on tiptoes and cupping their ears to listen to the amplified and meditative sound of the ice and river in motion. This was a grounding exercise and example of site-specific genius. Putting my ear to the device gave me chills; it reminded me of the sentient lifeforce of the river that I grew up swimming, fishing and boating in as a child, a bit further south off of Hill Island, Thousand Islands.

The biennial even addresses the ways in which ice and snow can be manufactured or constructed. Minha Park, a Korean artist who lives between Seoul and Los Angeles, created A Story of Elusive Snow (2013). The artist wanders through Hollywood to find and document found objects from film sets of fake or man-made snow. She guides us in Korean as she encounters these objects as an outsider in a dynamic and fascinating contrast to the nature-made snow and ice in the region.

A work that splits the difference (pun intended) is Pas Perdus-Dedans by Maria Ezcurra (Argentinean-Mexican-Canadian based in Montréal) at Le Lieu, centre en art actuel. In a playful labyrinth, metallic sheets move with the motion of the viewer who becomes the participant in a choreography of their own choosing. When the artist spoke, she explained that she used the “emergency blanket” often found in safety kits. Her association with this material signaled enclosure as she saw people in detention centers given this to sleep at night. Outside she constructed a tiny home out of this material to show its instability and speak to forced migration due to climate change.

Another example of a work that has a sense of playfulness around a strong political topic is Near Far by Lebanese Canadian artist Joyce Joumaa, who brings humor, satire and visitors’ response into her video about the 1995 Québec Referendum. The immortal words and melodic trance of “My Heart Will Go On,” by Québécoise darling Céline Dion, bring to mind the heartbreak of Rose and Jack in Titanic when the pair are stranded before Jack sinks into the freezing depths. The song comes from a space in the gallery with a black curtain around it (like a voting booth), but has a mic on a stand inside for karaoke, and there’s a projection of images from the referendum about the possible annexation and complex cultural-linguistic politics of the province with b-roll of wintry scenes. This transcribes the English words of a French-speaking singer onto the land to show this fracture and cultural hybridity.

Similarly focused on the complexity of language is a text-based neon work by Joi Arcand (Cree artist born in Saskatchewan but living in Ottawa) applied to the frieze of Espace Quatre Cents. Its location in the building emphasizes its importance. While the provincial politics focus on the tension between French and English, the conversation around signage and recognition of indigenous languages is brought to the fore. While not in Cree territory, the artist gifts this reminder along with itihtin, which means “the way it flows.”

There were many gestures to Québec and broader Canada’s connection to the Global South through allusions to “snowbird” vacation living and to the ice that melts and becomes part of our shared waters. Two works that best elucidated this are Your Island Here (the banners and video performance of the banners by Puerto Rican artist Niba Pastrana Santiago) and the Container Series by Joiri Minaya (a Dominican artist based in New York City). The performance shows the artist swimming underwater as the banner twists around her, ribboning in the pool. The video and the banners as they are displayed on the ground and third floors read as a declarative statement that brings in the geopolitics of Puerto Rico, a territory of the United States. This work relates to the show because ice travels to these regions that interconnect us. In the other work, Minaya depicts women in lush Caribbean beach scenes with kitsch tropical patterns that they are wearing as a projection of the desire of snowbirds going to the Caribbean to vacation.

Separate from the actual biennial, the Wendat Storyteller Dominic Ste-Marie (who is also marketing and sales advisor at Tourism Wendake) discussed that the Wendat have been creating ladders for the many eels that call the area home. The ones that grow and mature in Wendake are mostly female, and they go to the Sargasso Sea off the coast of Bermuda to mate. Interrupting the ease of travel for these mostly female eels could cause the collapse of the entire eel population. This showcases global ecological collaboration and interdependence.

Another work that emphasized fluidity but more in a cultural-religious way is Ahchiouta’ah by Ludovic Boney (Wendat artist based in Lévis, QC) in Grand Théâtre de Québec. Set against the ’80s brutalist incised concrete walls that have an archaeological feel, with wooden banisters and carpeting, is the holographic new media work that projects a woman sometimes in Indigenous regalia and sometimes in a nun’s habit. The projection onto fast-moving propellers with LED lights on them had a complex blinking or fading in and out effect. The sonic experience was that of hymnals and drumming, creating a truly transcendent experience that honors holding onto your own cultural traditions along with settler traditions.

Instead of propellers, Elias Nafaa (Lebanese Canadian who lives in Montréal and Beirut) marries meaning and form through the medium of glass. During the vernissage, immersed in my privileged art bubble, I learned that the U.S. declared war on Iran. I even encountered a protest of U.S. interventionism and genocide perpetrated by the Israeli government. Nafaa’s work felt particularly timely. Conical missiles stand on a roughly 2-foot-high plinth at La Chambre Blanche; he creates them to look like ice, and the monochromatic work in the white cube gallery has a somber effect. His purpose with this work is demonstrating how “colonization, and imperialism continued to, to enact in, in full force,” according to Morelli. “Nafaa’s piece, which is all about the bombs and missiles used on Lebanese and Palestinian territories over a period of about two years, and hearing about this first wave of attacks on Iran, but also then waves of attacks on Lebanon by the United States and Israel. It just felt surreal and devastating, but also putting forward the importance of having work that talks about these things. That’s the piece that I’ve kept thinking about like every day.”

Manif d’Art’s Quebec City Biennial runs through April 19, 2026.

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